But it's still on the list . . .

July 2009

07/16/2009

By the way, reason number 1,563,421 is the fact that they reaped the benefits of a proposed tryst with the government, without having to actually pay up. All the other reasons are still out there as well.

No, my reason, today, is their dumb online bill pay app. Never mind that it took them 4 months to get mine set up (after I was involuntarily sold to them by Citibank - apparently Citigroup decided my never-late-low-interest-charges credit card account just wasn't worth their time, or something). No, my problem is the way it tries to keep you on the treadmill of credit card payments for ever.

Case in point, if you log in to e-Bill, or whatever they're calling it this week, you have a pay link shown to you. Clicking on the pay link presents you with a form, pre-filled out. Here's the information it populates: payment account (my checking account), payment date (set to the due date of your last statement), and payment amount (set to the minimum payment due).

Let's start with the most egregious of these: the payment date. That's the date that the payment will be posted to the credit card account. But the payment date is just a string of numbers. There's no indication of what day of the week that is. What if it's Sunday? My bank isn't going to post payments on a Sunday, and so, just by using their app's defaults, I'm into late fee territory. Nice work, BofA!

And the payment amount? Yeah, let's default to the minimum payment, with no reference points on the screen as to what the full payment would be. To sort that out, I had to go back a page and restart my bill payment, which, by the way, forces me back to the original payment date.

So, they're basically trying to screw you into late fees and taking forever to pay off your credit card, just hoping that no one will want to do the extra work to pay a different amount or check what day it will be posted.

Most other payments I've had to do online give me the options I might want right there on the screen: radio buttons with minimum, full, and other, a date entry with a little calendar that pops up so you can easily check. But no. BofA wants to screw you because they took our tax dollars and it's still not enough for them. They are actively offshoring jobs, and even have a patent to describe the process, and it's still not enough.

Anyway, I'm paying off my card. The only reason I'm even keeping it is because of the money it's generating for my kid's college savings. But that's starting to seem like it's not worth it at all.